Welcome Home
by Stephensmat
Summary: When you reach Space, you start contacting other races. The first of them tell you how long they've been waiting to meet you.


Welcome Home

Consider the tree. It comes from a solid base at its trunk, but for all its strength, it must branch out. The branches split off from themselves and multiply endlessly. Each new off shoot is weaker, but the whole is full of life. Pluck one leaf, and the tree continues. Cut off a branch, and not only does the tree survive, the branch itself can start again.

Seeds can drop from the tree, feed animals, feed ecosystems, and if enough years pass, more trees put down roots.

One injection of life can sustain a world.

Welcome home.

You wouldn't know me, but I know you.

I am you. Look into your history, look into your world and you will realize that you have seen me before. When some spark of you burned in a dull creature's eyes, and you looked at the stars for a reason you couldn't define, I was what you searched for.

We were the first. The first that we know about. But we know the Galaxy you see, edge to edge. And when we looked, we saw that we were alone.

We left our world, explored the stars, and found none like ourselves. We were alone. Our civilization thrived for ages. But what is the life of one race, compared to the vast stretches of cosmic time? We knew that someday we would be gone. If it happened today, or a billion turns of the galaxy from now, we knew it would.

There was such grief on our world, we sped the deconstruction of our existence horrifically, allowing our whole society to mourn the silence that answered our calls.

And then we realized. Our world had life. The root of the tree. The first.

We turned our knowing inward. We studied the billions of miracles that take place one after another to create a life. We turned to our history to see where we went wrong.

And then we created a life. We brought you plants, and animals, and cells, and bacterium, and heat, and atmosphere, and DNA, and minerals, and resources. We grew the first of you in our laboratories and we seeded a world that seemed viable, and we hid ourselves, to watch what happened.

When we saw the swimming around, we saw that some of the cells we had created to make the water livable for plant life… it was attacking each other. We were horrified at all the work we did being eaten in a tidal pool. So we tried again, adapted the first forms, tweaking them at every step. Another billion turns, and this time we tailored the environment to suit our chosen life form. Anything that could risk them, we killed it or changed it.

It was a disaster. They never even looked up. They never even noticed that the stars were there. They had no dream. They had no songs. They just… faded.

We were alone. We were watching our creation with barely veiled… disgust, and then we were alone again.

But we had gained something. There was no lethargy in our race anymore. We tore the complete history of that world apart, looking for what we missed.

Till finally, their world; that tiny pool of lichen… became their kingdom. They stalled. There was nothing to keep them going.

So we forced the issue. We forced the first of our children to grow bigger. So much bigger. We had to redesign them completely, tweak them all over again, generation after generation. It became the obsession of our race, we watched them silently.

The debate raged endlessly, about how to raise our children, about how long to make their limbs, what color to give their grass, whether they should have scales, or fur, or skin.

Hundreds of millions of entries, hundreds of millions of opinions. We were creating life, and we needed it to be what we wished of it.

And it worked. They gave each other names, they gathered together when their nights came, they looked to the stars and didn't know they were looking at us.

And their music… their music was so sweet. So young.

We kept going. We changed them again, to make them hold to each other more, to make them like the songs they wrote…

They dreamed. They dreamed and they talked abut their dreams.

When our world saw that theirs had created fire, and huts, and fishing nets and woven baskets, there was a celebration that lasted a year.

And then it went so wrong.

Suddenly their nets were used on other tries, and so were rocks and sharpened sticks. The hands we gave them for tools created weapons.

And then… the sticks are powered by tension weapons. Catapults and string-bows.

And then… The tension weapons are replaced with explosives.

And then… There was no more 'and then.'

We were in shock, watching over a dead world, searching for the last of them that still survived the holocaust that lit up the world we built for them with unbearably bright lights.

I was there. It was a billion turns of the Rim behind us, but I was there. I saw the last of them fall down, the residue of their destruction making him weak. He looked as bleak as we did.

It was so fast. Billions of years. Billions of songs. Billions of voices and lives… what was it all for? In what seemed like a blink, it eradicated itself. All that set up, and it ended in one flash…

We were alone. For one shining moment, we were preparing to meet them face to face, and then we were alone again.

But we had gained something. There was no lethargy in our race anymore. We tore the complete history of that world apart, looking for what we missed. We thought that perhaps we had tweaked them too much, made their survival too competitive.

So we tried again.

And we realized. Life abides where there is balance.

We learned that competition is necessary. It strengthens the muscle, it fires the will. We reordered the galaxy to reflect this balance.

Life abides where there is balance. From the explosion of creation, something had to be put in to move the balance back to centre. When we made ecosystems, we made predators. A hunter kills prey, the prey's body enriches the soil, life grows out of death. Destruction is a function of creation. Gravity and motion. Heat and cold. Every star that exploded sent matter into the galaxy. The galaxy spins, bringing these rapidly moving fronts of gravity together, creating ripples in space as though in an ocean. Planets formed from the chaos of creation, leaving their final forms perfected. Heat and moisture, creating chemical and atmosphere.

And so we created destruction too. We created a force in the galaxy that would test strength, and viability, and resilience.

The Grox.

When we realized what they were, and what we had done, we declared war, for the first time in the billions of years of recorded history, there was war. We were fools. We thought that we merely had to cut down our creation, but we made them to be engines of destruction. The Grox are a people bred for war. The Grox are a people who live to destroy.

Life abides where there is balance. The Grox are the worst imbalance we ever made.

When they turned to us and saw the things we could do, and the life we could make… they saw only potential for more destruction. The power to remove planets from orbit and ignite stars.

They are anti-life itself. So we turned our power on them. We thought that would be enough. But still they destroyed what we made.

And so we hid it. We hid what we knew. We hid the ultimate tool of all creation from the most perfect destroyers the universe has ever known. They fought for centuries to get to it, but their forms are so corrupted, so purely toxic that their life is anti-life. Simply being on a livable planet is poison to them, simply coming near the Staff of Life is death to them. So they surrounded it. They took the entire Galactic core, full of gravity shifts and exploding stars and they conquered and captured and killed.

But the work was done. Life had been seeded throughout the galaxy. The Grox could not stop it from growing. We had at last learned our craft, and gained what we needed. We gave ourselves an answer. We called out to the cosmos, and there is a chorus to answer.

And the Grox to hunt their voices.

Forgive us.

Forgive us, our children. We made the galaxy a dangerous place for you to grow up, but no cradle can last forever.

I do not deny that I manipulated your progress. We had to keep you moving in the right direction, keep you from burning yourselves out. It was a simple matter. The right tweak to make someone faster, and he in turn passed it on. Another tweak to give someone better color vision, and suddenly you had artists. Another tweak to enlarge your brains, and suddenly you had engineers. From the chaos of our creation, your final form survived.

We created destruction, but we wasted nothing. The molecules of your body are the transmuted result of molecules that came from the food you ate, or the water you drank. The molecules of the food you ate are the transmuted molecules of the same rain that fell on the soil and were drawn into the plant, or eaten by the animal.

But do not think us God. For every change we made, every tweak to every lifetime, the question that comes to each of us in turn, is 'What or Who Did This For Us?'

It was such a long game we play. We cannot create anything, we can only transform. Transform the nebulous nothing that was into a sustaining something that is. The world you grew on, we seeded. Including you. We have long perfected the art of creating. We made the stars explode, just to spread radiation through the cosmos. We made the asteroids fall from the sky, just to warm up your world.

The molecules of the ship you came in, was originally the same matter that was in the minerals of your world in the ground beneath your feet. The ground beneath your feet we pulled together from the shattered remains of worlds and stars that we made explode. You have not left your world, you have finally reached the place where all you knew came from.

We have waited for this moment so long. You made it. You survived. It is such a special thing to have crossed over. Your world did not destroy itself. Your people did not lose their dream. You wouldn't know me, but I know you.

I am you. Look into your history, look into your world and you will realize that you have seen me before. When some spark of you burned in a dull creature's eye, and you looked at the stars for a reason you couldn't define, I was what you searched for.

Welcome home.


End file.
